Boogie on the beach, rumba in the jungle

If you really want to get in touch with the locals, learn to dance before your trip, writes Jasper Winn

The English can't dance. But they're learning how to, and fast. Competing dance schools in London have started salsa wars in their efforts to get pupils, and tango and rumba classes across the country are packing out faster than girls' night in a northern disco. After cooking and gardening, you can expect "how to dance" series as the next (and much more interesting) television craze. "I can't dance, I don't want to," is giving way to "Yes, Sir, I can boogie ... and waltz, samba, swing and merengue as well."

For dance, as with most of the good things in life, travel has been the reason for a growing realisation that people do some things better abroad. Whereas English social dancing is all too often a self-conscious squirming to avoid actually touching anybody, or a lagered-up contact sport akin to tag wrestling, the rest of the world are in each others' arms, and swaying and shimmying away in cafes, clubs and cantinas.

Foreign holidays - in Cuba, Spain, Senegal, anywhere - are certainly giving people the chance to unlace their lead boots. It does help, though, to do a bit of groundwork before throwing yourself into carnival or saying "Si, gracias," when asked "Quiere a bailar?"

Julia Willis, a regular at London tango classes, is learning for a purpose. "I was in Argentina, before, when I couldn't dance tango and it was such a disappointment - it would have been lovely to have taken part when the bandonens (accordions) started up. If you're in a place like that and you can't dance, you might as well be blind or deaf. So I'm preparing for next time."

Learning a vocabulary of dance steps has become as essential for the clued-up traveller as carrying the latest Rough Guide phrase book. Cristina Portugal, who has been taking salsa and tango classes in Lisbon and London, sees dance in exactly those language terms. "Right now I'm learning the ABC of it all, but when I'm actually travelling I'm looking forward to learning the slang of dance - that's going to be the fun part - but you have to learn the basic grammar first."

I got lucky and learnt the advantages of dancing early. As a rumbustious six-year-old I was dragged kicking and hollering to ballet classes for the equivalent of puppy obedience training. The idea was to teach me how to bow, how not to step on people's feet and how to be nice to little girls. I've never looked back. Teenage years in Ireland showed me the attractions of nifty footwork at ceilidhs, as well as the late-night fun of old-time "close dances". In my early twenties I spent a month as a dancing partner for hire in Athens' Plaka district clubs, and interrupted a cycle trip across West Africa for a spell as harmonica player and on- stage dancer for a high-life band in Ouagadougou. Then there was a brief period as a stunt-dancer for the Irish National Ballet. Travel and dancing, it became obvious to me, went together.

But where I really realised the power of dance was in Spain in the Eighties. There, even the most pedestrian of clubs would break the boringly fashionable pattern of faux-punk and Euro-pop with interludes of flamenco. The cool shuffling would stop, arms would rise above thrown-back heads, hips snake and feet clatter the floor in sessions of rumbas and sevillanas. I wanted to be able to do that, even if only well enough merely to join in. I never did master flamenco - or, indeed, get much beyond the bare essentials needed to propel me through the free-for-all gyrations in the Communist tent at Seville's spring ferias - but I did realise that nobody was self- conscious about their dancing; just doing it was the key to success.

Or almost the key. I discovered that the more potential for fun a particular dance form had to offer, the greater the necessity for a tad of tuition and practice before taking to the floor. And if the most fun was to dance as close as possible to somebody else while twining and braiding your collective legs into mercurial and seductive patterns in time to the music, then serious preparation was called for. Indeed, by the time you got around to tango, with its ganchos - the fast-paced, mid-step hooking together of a couple's legs at knee-height - and the sliding of your pump-shod foot in and out of your partner's rapidly scissoring lower limbs, the potential for disaster was high. One mistimed step could turn you from Rudolph Valentino in The Gaucho to Jacky Chan swiping the legs out from under an opponent and dumping them on the floor like a sack of coal, with laddered stockings to boot.

The opportunities for body-contact highlight how wonderfully non-PC dance is. It's about display and seduction, and usually smoking and drinking as well. And once you get into real dancing - partner dancing - you've got the added inequality of somebody having to lead and somebody having to follow. That can be refreshing. For Julia, it's part of the attraction of learning to tango. "As an independent woman it's sometimes nice just to go out and dance and be a follower -- to be led - preferably by a lovely, handsome foreign man who doesn't have any language in common with you except dance."

By the time a job with horses took me to Cuba and Venezuela, I'd picked up a repertoire of spins, slides, twists and twirls that allowed me to steer any reasonably forgiving partner through some semblance of rumba, son and joropo. The cowboys I was working with were even less PC. "Dancing is just like riding a horse," Miguel told me. "You need strong legs, gentle hands, a good sense of balance and you must move from the hips." In the evenings, still wearing our spurs and hats, we'd load up on cheap rum and dance to Cuban country bands, or, in Venezuela, to the harp and bongos of llaneras (cowboy) songs. "A good horseman can ride any horse and it's the same with dancing," said the vaqueros, and it was true. The best horsemen were the best dancers, partnering the girls from the ranches and villages with the calm precision of dressage riders, mixed with the hold-on-and-holler plunges of bronco-busters.

Dancing is all about wordless communication - a light pull on a shoulder, a step forward and a shift of weight, a shared understanding of the music and how it moves bodies. Pimpa Mingkwan dances ballet, jazz, ballroom, salsa and tango. "Dancing is a way to meet people; you don't have to speak a word of their language - you communicate with your bodies." Next she wants to learn flamenco, because, "if you know a lot of dances, then you have more places you can go in the world and dance with people".

And just where are the most rewarding dance destinations? Well, pretty much anywhere. Africa is full of bars and small clubs with some of the danciest music around. Dancing in Brazil, Venezuela and Colombia is close to mandatory, enforced by high-quality alcohol and defy-you-not-to-hit- the-floor rhythms. Hungary has numerous dance houses with live music - csrds being the main leg-shaking exercise - though some can be rather earnest and purist. For tango, short of heading for the cantinas of Buenos Aires, both Amsterdam and Helsinki have vibrant, if idiosyncratic, clubs. Ireland, especially in Clare, Kerry and Galway, has nightly accordion- driven ceilidhs with, invariably, friendly locals to initiate and teach incomers.

But for a one-stop total dance destination, my nomination is Cuba. The Cuban bands whose CDs are the big world music craze across Europe are very likely to be providing sparkling beats and joyful melodies in some local dance club back home. And in Cuba everybody dances - not to dance in a Havana nightspot would mark you out as much as would stripping to your underwear and break-dancing centre-floor in some English disco. In Cuba you have to dance, and there's no way you won't want to.

Finding dance hotspots world-wide - Morocco, Iran, Australia, India - is easy. Dancers the globe over need dancing partners, and so if you can dance, they'll find you. Federico Mazandarani, who teaches six tango classes a week across London, believes this. "I've been to Tunisia and had a queue of people who had never danced tango, but they wanted to dance. And as a leader I can take anybody, ask them to close their eyes and follow; and even if they've never danced tango, they can do it."

The lesson is plain - if you want to whirl around the world, then take some time to learn that esperanto of the body - the basic hopping, skipping and spinning that is dance - before you go.

And the alternative? Retired Royal Navy commander Ronnie Herbert Smith recalls a dance-related embarrassment in the 1960s. "I was dancing - waltzing and foxtrot, normal, simple stuff - with the actress Shirley Ann Field at a packed open-air club on the Riviera." They were the only two on the floor when the band launched into a cha-cha-cha, "which I had no idea of how to dance. We were still alone on the floor, with the spotlight on us. I gave it a shot, but I tripped one way and then got tangled up in her legs, and we stumbled and staggered around until there was a tap on my shoulder and the animateur, Rene Le Grand, took Shirley Ann into his arms, and said, 'Ronnie, you can't dance; go and sit down'. And the spotlight followed me all the way across the floor as I slunk back to my table."

COME DANCING

WHERE TO LEARN

Forever Piazzolla Tango (tel: 0181-291 4977) runs lessons and clubs six nights a week in London for beginners, intermediate and advanced.

The Dance Holiday Company (tel: 0171-499 5232) offers flamenco, salsa and tango classes in Spain. A seven-night flamenco break in Granada, including seven nights B&B, transfers from Malaga airport and 10 hours dancing tuition, costs from pounds 375, excluding flights. Return flights cost about pounds 200 in high season.

Caledonian Languages Abroad (tel: 0131-621 7721) organises dance courses in Cuba and Spain.

The Finnish Tango Festival in Seinajoki runs from 7 to 11 July and includes concerts, horse races and tangoing. For details, call the Finnish Tourist Office (tel: 0171-839 4048).

When travelling it is often possible to find dance schools or classes aimed at travellers, especially in Cuba, West Africa, Brazil and other dance-crazy cultures. Look in listings magazines or English-language papers.